Charlotte Selina Bompas
British memorist and novelist
Charlotte Selina Bompas (née Cox; 24 February 1830 – 21 January 1917) was a missionary, speaker and memoirist in Canada.
Early life
Most likely born in England, her parents were Charlotte Skey and Joseph Cox, and she was known as Nina. She spent much of her youth in Italy, and wrote for various magazines. She showed little interest in religion in her early life, but the 1871 murder of missionary John Patteson in the Solomon Islands apparently inspired her to turn towards evangelicalism in her midlife. She found an opportunity to become a missionary when, on 7 May 1874 she married her cousin, William Bompas, the first Anglican bishop of the Diocese of Athabasca in northwestern Canada.
Missionary career
While living at a Hudson's Bay Company outpost in Athabasca Bompas started keeping a diary, recording her feelings of loneliness as her husband travelled for long periods seeking converts. She took on her own missionary work, learning to speak the Slavey language and to play the harmonium to enliven the austere church services. In 1876 she travelled to Fort Chipewyan on her own to make preparations for a new mission there.
Bompas was noted for her work with the local children, even informally adopting two children whose parents were ill, dead, or absent. One, Jenny or Jeannie, died in infancy, and the second, Lucy May (known as Owindia) appears to have died in England as a toddler.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charlotte Selina Bompas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.